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jfruhlinger writes "One of the reasons the iPad has stayed at the top of the tablet heap for so long is that — in contrast with the story of the Mac and PC 25 years ago — the iPad has remained competitive with its rivals on price. That may be starting to change, with cheaper tablets like the Amazon Fire coming to market. And now, the sub-$100 Novo7 is on sale in China, sporting Android 4.0. It promises to arrive in the U.S. for a similar price point soon."
The official press release from MIPS has a bit more detail. Of interest is the use of a MIPS SoC designed by Ingenic.

That one is capacitive. I actually bought their earlier effort, the $150 Novo8, and was pleasantly surprised: 8", 1280x800 capacitive TN, HD video playback with HDMI, OK build quality. What spoiled that was the 3hr battery life, but I knew that before buying it.

Resistive or capacitive, the ones I've tried are junk. You get what you pay for. They're not cheap to make and getting support from Chinese-based organizations has been frustratingly difficult for me. Others may have had different experiences, but there's a different expectation set by mainstream vendors, that while being occasionally ugly, isn't the total lack of support that I've seen from direct Chinese sources.

I'm really tired of hearing "you get what you pay for" as an excuse for paying inflated prices for fanboi products. For an established product that's priced in true relation to its build quality, that might be true, but for relatively new products or products with artificially high profit margins, it is most definitely not true. Sometimes what you get is inversely related to what you pay for it.

Mind you, the buyer should beware, but there are deals to be made if you know what to look for.

> It's often a reality. Yes, there are good and decent values out there, but by and large, price and value have a proportionate correlation.

I disagree. Especially in electronics, price has very little to do with complexity and build quality, and just about everything to do with mindshare. Look, we're all geeks here -- we can't think of any examples of stuff that's overpriced for the (a) cost of manufacture and (b) actual value of the product in relation to competition for same? Or products that were

Yet for some reason, many items tend to cost the same in euros as they do in dollars. Taxes, customs and shipping, I suppose.

And differences in pricing.

You see, in North America, our prices are sans taxes. That $140 will be $155 after Canadian taxes, for example. Plus environmental fees and the like.

In Europe, you have stuff like 20% VAT and 20% duties and such, which are built into the price. Your EUR140 device, you pay EUR140.

And nevermind the various consumer protection laws (which are much stronger in Europe). 90 day warranties are common in North America, you'd have to buy extended warranties ($40+) to get to your 2 year guaranteed by EU laws and such.

I bought my kids an Arnova 10 G2 which is available with a capacitive screen for $191, not bad for a 10" tablet with a 1Ghz processor, 512MB of ram, 4GB of internal storage and an SD slot. The stock rom is a bit limited but there's a rooted ROM with Google apps available from the community. I'm looking forward to ICS since Archos has already shown it on tablets running the same processor. The battery life is pretty good too, probably 8 hours if you're not playing flash heavy content. I left it for a day wit

The Fire is only 7 inches. It's not really the same category as an iPad or any of the 10 inch Android tablets. I think it's stupid when people compare the two. There is an element of overlap for sure, but I don't see this eating significantly into the larger tablet market.

You can watch movies on 5 and 7 inch screens in a pinch, but I'd probably prefer just to read instead.

My Kindle (Keyboard version) is 7 inches and it's just big enough to be comfortable for reading in portrait orientation. When I've used my phone for reading, I've needed to switch to landscape to read comfortably.

I probably wouldn't even use my Xoom for watching movies, but I'd definitely choose it over a 7 inch tablet for web browsing and watching YouTube. I also like it for reading.

I purchased the Fire on the idea it might make a good present for parents to use while camping (free WIFI is almost always found in the campgrounds they visit) for simple email and browsing. It also want to see how it performed versus the iPad for the same.

The experience is certainly not up to the standard set by Apple but I find it very acceptable when one factors in the price point. The price point is important because for me a loss of a $200 device is far easier to take than losing the $500+ iPad. The Fire has already done the bounce test on the carpet, something I hope the iPad never tries.

Web browsing, hands down better on the iPad. The Fire just doesn't have the oomph. So will knock offs have the same problem? It might be related to Amazon's browser but I am not wholly sure on that. Mail reading is fine, it could be better, but it works and I tend to leave the Fire on the counter and one hand hold it while eating so I can check up on mail. Something that the iPad form factor is not good at.

I hope the seven inch size takes off, it really is much more portable without losing too much screen to make it just worth sticking with a phone. There are rumors Apple may head this way too which should push prices down.

I find I can treat a seven inch tablet more like a tablet than the 11 inch iPad, with the iPad I just felt I needed an external keyboard, possibly because after use it certainly loses the feel of portability. You don't one hand an iPad.

I tried a friend's Kindle Fire, and was a bit disappointed with the performance.. I don't know if it was just me, but the interface felt laggy and failed to register presses about 1/4 of the time. Amazon's launcher is garbage, and the rest of the hacks to the OS likely are too. I think performance will improve quite bit once someone gets an AOSP build of Android good and stable for it.

Both screens are almost the exact same resolution, so they show just as much information. Size only matters if your eyesight is poor. Tablets only do very few things. Email, media consumption, and browsing. Those are the three main things that are done the most across all tablets. The cheaper ones like the Fire do this perfectly fine for a LOT cheaper. The IPad has the iTunes store, but for a $400 premium, most people will not bother going forward.

Keep telling yourself that. Despite all the promises, even the iPads are still computers with many typical computer problems. Anyone I know who actually got one instead of just marveling about it has felt the enthusiasm over the managed experience fade. It's still a novelty market, and while there are many people who strongly desire a tablet, that is mostly a testament to the failure of the PC platform, not proof that tablets can do what people want. As the insight that tablets are not the solution to all domestic computer problems seeps in, the pressure on the price will increase. Nobody wants to spend that kind of money on something that ultimately does not deliver and ends up as a glorified universal remote.

Funny, I sold my iPad to buy the iPad 2. You don't know ANYONE who still enjoys it? PS: It's an awfully large novelty market. Tens of millions and all. Funny, the one thing I don't use it for is as a glorified universal remote.

I do use mine as a glorified universal remote. I control my crestron processors for the theater, whole house audio and home automation daily on mine. It's great to simply enter the crestron app and turn on the lights, open the garage door, turn on the sirius radio to Octane her in the den, etc...

Strange, my kids have one and I get to use it at night. I don't think my enthusiasm has faded because there is so much to do on it and I keep discovering more things to do.Oddly it is more functional than lugging our netbook around.The netbook has more flexibility, but is a hassle to use by comparison. Computers have their place. Tablets have their place.

BTW these are great educational tools for kids. I suppose if you are a programmer or developer of some sort it might not fill your needs, but then one woul

You dont know many people then. I know hundreds in business that use their ipad daily. for notes, PDF's Cad drawing review, presentations, etc... IT's used far more than laptops in the 20+ businesses I support. And everyone I know that has them for recreational uses them constantly. In fact I know that many people look to buy a second one to keep in the bathroom.

Detailed PDF's and CAD drawings are the WORST use of an ipad, it's sluggish as all get out. The ipad2 is slightly better but the performance was still bad enough that we altered our siteplan build process to create PNG's for ipad use. We're not talking mega-complex drawings here either, just stick outlines of shopping plazas with the parking lot layout shown.

Telling myself what, exactly? Who said that tablets are meant to be a replacement for computers? I have a desktop, ultrabook, netbook, tablet, PS3, Xbox 360 and a phone. They have a hell of a lot of overlapping features, but all of them save the 360 get used regularly. My tablet is the only one that I'm guaranteed to use every day of the week.

I used to think that tablets would be crap too until I got my first capacitive screened phone with a 5" screen and realised that a touchscreen keyboard might be accept

until there are word processors, Exchange support, or other basic functionality, Android tablets will be considered at best a novelty.

WTF are you talking about? For one thing there is Google Docs. For another, my Dell Streak came with "QuikOffice" or something like that that does word docs. Not that I'd really want to use an office suite on a tablet when I have a laptop available.

Android has had Exchange support since version 1.5 - ie since 2009. You are either lazy and ignorant, or flat out trolling.

Finally, there is device security. There has yet to be a single piece of malware on an iPad in the wild. Shows you something doesn't it?

As far as assembly goes I haven't had to use it in 10 years of professional work but some of the concepts learned help out. Some of my test questions were also questions asked in job interviews, also when you make a doubly linked list or an array in assembly you know that data structure inside and out.

Price was not the only reason Apple lost out to the PC, not by a long shot. Gates seemed to be the only smart enough to figure out the whole familiarity factor to computing, people who use X computer at work will be much more likely to buy X computer for use at home as well. Knowing "how to use" such a computer puts the buyer at ease, and of course they can always take stuff from work home. Furthermore, there was a lot of stagnation in Mac OS after Jobs' ouster, pre-Mac OS sucked even worse than Windows, as hard as that is to believe.

If price was the only thing consumers considered, we would be seeing Linux everywhere and Apple wouldn't be gaining market share every year....

My memory is of people wanting me to build 10 PCs for the cost of buying 3 macs. True I was basically a cheap hardware whore; but the fact remains, it was significantly cheaper to build then buy. Add to that the way free copies of DOS popped up out of nowhere. It was if Microsoft was making the OS as available as possible so people would buy software made for it instead of their competitors. wink wink nudge nudge.

It's hard to remember these days, but before 1985 or so, those three letters were all a platform needed to be successful. Anything IBM was automatically better than anything else. (Ironically, that's sort of the reputation that Apple has today.) There was nothing Apple could have done to compete with that kind of mindshare. It wasn't a fair fight; it wasn't even a fight. It was over before the first Lisa was demoed.

Microsoft took the insidious approach, which was to hitch itself to IBM ear

Phone games are not exactly built to run on a specific hardware arch like in the PC world. Most are just Java/Flash applets.

Yes and no. I've heard a fair number of them use the NDK, which means the.so loaded by the Java part will be for ARM, maybe x86 as well if they used the current NDK. MIPS is not part of the official toolchain, though there is a 3rd-party NDK for it. As of 2.3 it is possible to make a game entirely natively.

Absolutely correct. No developer in their right mind would use any of the NEON vector instructions available on ARM CPUs. I mean come on, who could possibly want to process 4 floats in the time it takes to process 1? Especially when that code works on all of the ARM android phones too. I mean, what is the point in bothering to write scalable efficient code for a platform with a finite battery life? I can see absolutely no point to it at all. As a game developer myself, I can say with some authority that the

Somewhere around 1/4 or 1/3 of the apps on my Archos tablet use a native library. I know because I occasionally monitor how much stuff is in the/data/data/*/lib directory, and for the apps with particularly fat libraries, I offload/data/data/*/lib to an SD card, and symlink to it.

Here are two examples: The open source APV PDF viewer that I am on the dev team for is just a relatively small java wrapper around a native library that encapsulates muPDF code, with no changes in the core muPDF code, and uses o

do you really think the majority of apple customers care about price? they'll fork out $2k+ for a 17" mbp w/ a 5400rpm hdd... i highly doubt a cheap chinese co's tablet is going to put a dent in their thinking.

Not only that the price is expensive after factoring in the shipping charges, this tablet is MIPS-based, so it will have a very limited Android Market. Take note!

The tablet to get is actually Ainol Novo 7 Advanced, not the Novo 7 Basic stated in the article. The 7A has a much better hardware. It is widely believed that the Novo7A will get ICS real soon as there are videos of it running ICS circulating in the chinese forums.

This reminded me of a post regarding [yellowdog-board.com] thoughts on Yellow Dog Linux [ydl.net] being ported to velocity's stuff. It made me wonder if a more X11 friendly version of Linux could be ported to another inexpensive tablet running MIPS [amazon.com]. Maybe more tablets like these will help make that happen. I'm getting to like the idea of running a phone inside Xnest.

I've seen low-end tablets from China. I have one. At least the ones that were available 2 years ago are unusably slow. The next time I get one, I'll pay careful attention to the specs. A $90 tablet from china running ICS is garbage if it takes a full second for it to respond to any fingertap.

The HP touchpad was sub-100 for a while, and maybe soon will be able to install ICS on it. Anyway, comparing on it WebOS and CM7, i prefer the WebOS user interface, not sure how much things will improve in ICS.

I'm not going to get a data-plan with one because I object to paying $50 a month to carry a device around with me.

I simply don't have that much desire to access the internet on the go... sure, it would be cool- but not $50 a month worth.

I'm not going to use it to watch videos often. I have a television with a larger screen and better resolution at home.

If I'm not at home- I'm driving somewhere, I'm busy, or I'm at work. Yeah- there may be occasions- waiting at the doctor's etc- but rarely get enough uninterrupted time to watch anything at those places.

Some people have use of a tablet- some people it is all they need- but I know there are plenty of people like me.

For us, if we got a tablet (or if we already own a tablet)- it is a toy more than a functioning device. For us (and I suspect we're the majority of those 30 and over)- price matters- because we don't want to throw money away on a toy that will be available half the price in 18 months.- then half the price again in another.

So price matters. Even if it isn't as good as an iPad. You need to get a device that is low enough to be worthwhile just being the "occasional" toy that connects to our wifi.

Expensive Samsungs and iPads have their market- kids and executives who have $50 a month to throw on data plans. (yes, and geeks who like electronic toys- and don't balk at the idea of shelling money for them- which is probably a lot of people on here- which makes this not the average representation of the planet earth)

To get the rest of us- you need to make the devices cheaper- OR get the cost of data plans to be low enough that we consider it worthwhile.

Perhaps the devices themselves are just premature?I'm not sure about manufacturing costs, but a large part of their purpose - consumption of media, particularly online, on the go - would be massively benefitted by nationwide/'global' wifi access.

Comparing an iPad or Galaxy 10.1 tablet to these cheap 7" Tablets is like comparing an i7 Laptop and a cheap netbook. Some people at first will buy cheap but when they realize it's limitations they'll opt for the better tablet. I purchased a cheap 10" Epad awhile back for $150 and was sorely disappointed with its performance, and lack of features. Most of these cheap tablets are slow and don't respond well to your touch, leading to misspelled words when you type and frustrating web browsing experiences.

This "sub-$100 Android 4.0 tablet" is kind of like saying you can run Windows 7 on a 600mhz Pentium 3 with 512mb of Ram. Yes, it actually boots and runs, and you can get Aero working on an old ATI card, but that doesn't mean it's a pleasant experience. If you were to sell such a PC with the headline "Windows 7 PC, runs great", you would be one hell of a scumbag and the potential buyer just might swing that heavy dinosaur upside your head.

The chinese love cheap gadgets, because often times it's cheap gadget or no gadget. For us here in the western world, we tend to want un-crap gadgets, perhaps because we have better things to do than staring at "busy" spinners. Maybe if I lived in the 3rd world, my opinion would be different, but I don't.

My co-worker's iPads are sluggish. The real reason why it is successful is because people are stupid enough to think all Apple products are top shelf. Not always the case...
Even if the lower priced tablets are just below par, it still perks the attention of people not wanting to fork over their wallets for an iPad.

The original iPad, if given the latest possible OS update, sure.The iPad 2 is far, far, faaaaaaaaaaar 'snappier'/smoother and has a generally more refined user experience than any Android tablet on the market right now.

Which is odd, because some of the Android hardware out there is pretty close to par, if not better.

Can't watch it from here, but I can say with 100% certainty that every Android tablet I've played around with - and I should have kept a list, in hindsight - has gotten noticeably slower/clunkier as its storage nears full.

The problem with Facetime is you're locked in to Apple products. I really with Google would push Google Talk with video chat or Google+ Messenger via mobile a lot more. The tech is there and it works, across platforms, but hardly anyone knows about it it seems.

Otherwise I've found that for pretty much any mainstream app there's parity between the iOS and Android phone apps. Tablets may be a different story but I'm sure that'll get closer, too.

Apps come as an advantage because people tend to develop for a platform that everyone is buying (for reason, see my post). Now that Android tablets are starting to become relevant, and with a new OS that is much more available than Honeycomb, I can see developers having less barriers to creating tablet-friendly applications for Android tablets.

And if Facetime/front-facing cameras are the ONE reason why you went with iPhones, then YOU need to get your ass out of the sand yourself. Facetime is not the only application that allows video chatting on a mobile platform. Front-facing cameras? Let's see:

Bullshit. Viewing the Android phones at the majority of the US telecoms sites the phones with FFCs are in a tiny minority of all Android phones they are selling. But one doesn't really expect truth from a fandroid.

Why does it matter if only some of the Android phones have an FFC? If someone wanted an Android phone with an FFC so that they can do video chats, they can do so. How many models of iphone are there with an FFC, two? If the number of models with an FFC was important, then I guess Droid wins! But, it's not important. Some people don't care if there is an FFC, there is a wide variety of needs and the wide variety of Android phones are trying to hit the different markets, so they don't all have to have an FFC.

If FFC is such a big deal, didn't Droid have it before the iphone? At that time I think iphone had zero models with an FFC.

That's because to them its like comparing apples to oranges. The Transformer isn't really a tablet sure it has the rounded corners, a flat screen, and thin boarders but if Apple can't get the courts to ban its sale then it can't be a tablet.

Well, they do like to say that "There is not tablet market, there is an iPad market." Perhaps they are just confused about the fact that the rest of us are actually talking about tablets, and are not talking about a subset of Apple products.

I just bought a couple of these, though the current versions still have Android 2.3. They're remarkably well made for the price, and also remarkably responsive to use. They're not an iPad killer in that they're only 7" and 800 x 480 screens, but that doesn't mean they won't find their own niche.

It is really nice to have devices that work well and like you said...there are lots of niches to fill because people use devices differently.A 7" tablet would make a much much better media control center than either an iPad (a tad big) or iPhone (a tad small).

Given that a fair few slightly bigger named vendors(like the oh-so-adaptive-to-the-times Kodak; though hardly them alone) are selling mere digital photo frames, often with screens of only 7-10 inches(not infrequently of really shoddy pixel density) for 30-60 dollars, a fully functional small computer for $100 has all sorts of potentially interesting uses.

Heck, the 7inch USB display/touchscreen units from MIMO, which contain only enough logic to serve as a displaylink video device, go for north of $100...

I don't know what you mean by "iPad killer" but, to me, a large tablet is a huge turn-off, as is a pharaonic price tag for what' essentially a simple discount computer used as a secondary machine. To me, a 7-inch tablet selling for 100 euros beats a 10-inch selling for over 500 euros in every single meaningful comparison point. I believe I'm far from being the single one thinking like this, as this is essentially the same argument which pins the iPhone Vs android phones, and currently Android leads the smartphone market with a market share which goes well over 50%.

I don't know, until we see it we won't know much on the performance levels of it, but I do think there is a market for even a slugish cheap tablet. Durring the tablet craze, I got myself an netbook for $99, it's a cheap piece of crap, barely can handle flash games, but for basic utility purposes, reading, browsing the web etc... I still cannot wrap my head around the tablet craze or what makes them worth $500, to me they seem to be a fairly comfortable device, that can do almost as much as a low end laptop, almost the same size as middle end laptop, at the price of... a middle of the line laptop, but hey you can get a keyboard for it for only $20-$80 extra and make it even closer to a laptop!

The iPad can definitely be sluggish - regularly I have to wait more than 10 seconds for iBooks to display the book pages on opening, or go to swipe twice to turn a page because I thought it hadn't registered the first swipe only to have it turn two pages when the first swipe is eventually carried out.

Also, the iPads Safari has a tendency to reload pages when you switch between "tabs" - which can be fucking annoying when you are swapping between pages to cut and paste information or filling out a form... Even though I haven't added any new applications recently, it does seem to have gotten worse. Safaris UI can also lag a lot, with attempts to click on the bookmarks or "tabs" icons taking several seconds to register some times.

And thats without any other apps lingering in the background...

I love my iPad, I use it every day and its my primary browsing tool for on the couch or out and about, but it does have its foibles.

Since upgrading to iOS 5 (i.e. 2 major version upgrades from its original OS) I've noticed my iPad 1 becoming a bit sluggish - but not to the point of seriously spoiling the experience... and we're talking about an 18-month old tablet which is like, wow, 10 years old in dog years:-)

And thats without any other apps lingering in the background...

That's what you get when you listen to the Fandroids and allow 3rd Party Apps to multitask.

If an Android tablet actually comes out in the US for $100 or less, it won't matter whether the iPad is snappy or sluggish. What will matter is that for the cost of the cheapest iPad, one could buy five (5) of these. Heck, I'd buy one for each of my two teenaged boys (my wife already has an iPad2, a gift from her father) AND one for myself. Plus, two more to keep on the shelf as backup gifts for people.

Had I managed to get any HP Touchpads at $99 before they ran out I would have bought as many as I could get my hands on.

No there hasnt. All of them have been really old versions of Android which makes them crap. Hopefully this china company did not phone it in like the rest of them have and has created at least a useful tablet that does not suck.

That is the problem with sub $200.00 tablets. the suck level get's up there because of the hardware being cheaped out on.

You made a $70 dollar downpayment and will be paying off the phone over the next two years.

Yeah. Had he only bought an unlocked phone instead, he wouldn't have a bill every month over the next two years by way of contract. He'd just spend a lot more up front and have a bill every month. The carriers are going to get your $50 to $120 a month. It's the only way they will let you on their network.

In the US you can get T-Mobile "Value" plans that have exactly the same options as the regular plans, but they cost $20 less per month. On a 2 year contract it will only save you like $120*, but then after that you are saving a full $20/month for each month that you keep your existing phone.

I bought a $400 laptop last boxing day, which is pretty much bottom of the line for notebooks. There are a few cheaper models, but most of those are just last year's left over stock (I actually just saw the same laptop I bought last year for $300). It's actually built pretty well. There's no reason that a quality tablet should have to cost $500. Maybe sub $100 is a little low, but we should easily be seeing the price get to $200 for a really good tablet. There's only so much processing power you need on

It depends what you want to use them for. For laptops, cheap ones work fine for browsing, email, and watching videos. Thankfully, 99.999% of the use of tablets is this very thing. It doesn't matter how crap the hardware is so long as you can browse, check email, and view media. There is no reason to get an iPad at this point.

My dad just surprised my by dropping by yesterday and saying he'd just ordered one of these. My immediate reaction was "ah, no, what pile of inventory-to-clear has he picked up?" but the specs actually look pretty decent. I guess this is the point where we have functional tablets at a significantly cheaper price.